How To Save Time By Batching Blog Posts

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How To Save Time By Batching Blog Posts

Batching blog posts can save you hours of time when creating your blog content. How often do you look at your Editorial Calendar and realise that you need to send out a post TODAY but nothing is drafted and ready? Start looking for images but get distracted and go down the rabbit hole of the internet? Or put off writing your post because it seems *such* a massive task?

There is a solution. Introducing…batching!

What is batching?

Batching means grouping a together similar tasks and doing them all at one time. For example, rather than take one blog post through the entire stage of outlining, drafting, editing, finding mages and more, you would spend a morning outlining 4 or more blog posts. Then move on to drafting them. Then find all of the images you need.

Why batch?

Batching improves productivity. Switching from one task to the next – or simply switching when you get bored – wastes time. It interrupts your flow and when you come back to the task you take a while to get it back again. It is simply better to set a single task for a period of time and be fully focused. This can especially help with blog writing when you are doing a series or theme of posts where you can grab and insert all the links for the interconnecting content.

Here’s how to get started

Brainstorm out your content ideas

First of all, set a focus for your posts for this month. Write down as many ideas that interlink to this theme that you can think of. If you are finding yourself a little stuck, try typing your niche into Answer the Public to see what people search for on your topic.

Perhaps you are launching a free e-book on toddler meals. You could write about how to prepare meals quickly, what foods can be made ahead and frozen for the days the toddler just won’t cooperate, the go-to favourite meals in your family, how to balance their meals with the nutrients they need.

Whatever your focus is, write down at least five or six ideas.

2. Write out the initial outlines of your posts.

Outline the content that you want to include for each post. What other content do you have that you can interlink? Jot down some subheadings to keep you on track.

I like to do my outlining in separate windows straight into WordPress but it is just as easy to do it with pen and paper or in a word doc if that is what you prefer. I have provided a sheet in the workbook as well.

3. Write a rough draft.

Don’t worry about the look of the post, the spelling, the grammar. Just get the rough draft done and onto the screen.

4. Edit

Now that the words are out of your head, the main work has already been done. Edit the posts for spelling and grammar. Make sure the ideas flow in a logical order and move paragraphs around if you need to.

5. Upload

Go ahead and upload the posts to your website drafts. Add in your styling for titles and link to other relevant posts. Add images, checklists or subheadings for easy readability.

sprinkled in the main text, but be careful to make sure the copy reads naturally, and not like stuffed keywords!

Also, add in some related keywords throughout the post if you can.

7. Evaluate your headlines

Headlines need to be catchy enough to draw people in and informative enough that they know what you are going to talk about. A great resource for any blogger is the Coshedule Headline Analyzer that will give you a score for your headline and ways to improve it if needed.

8. Create your Freebies or Content Upgrades

It is a great idea to offer content upgrades in order to capture and nurture leads. Create all of your content upgrades using templates (templates also save you time!) to maintain consistency of style. Don’t forget to set up your automation within your email provider for these to be sent out.

9. Find and edit your images

When searching for images you will often find one that isn’t quite right but it might fit another of the blog posts you are batching. Create your Pinterest images using templates again – this saves you having to open up your image software and editing your colours and styles. Simply switch over the image, change the text and you are good to go!

Now that you have four or five blog posts with a consistent theme and linking together, you can schedule them out to publish!

These eleven tasks don’t all have to be done on one day, but setting out a day batching blog posts for the month will be time well invested. On the date of publication, you can simply lift the pin image and send it out to the world.

So what can else I batch when blogging?

When you have put together your posts, spend some time crafting alternate headlines and promotion copy so that if you load them into a social media scheduler the post will not sound stale. Similarly, if you are promoting on facebook groups, different promotion copy may attract different audiences. There is nothing worse than seeing the same blog promotion copy across multiple groups! Enter them in a spreadsheet or on a Trello card to make them easy to grab on promotion day. Track your promotional content to see which copy is converting to the traffic you want to your site.

I hope you have found this overview of batching useful and will help you streamline your blog writing! Don’t forget to download your Batching Blog Posts Workbook!